Newman on Imagination and Religious Belief

Ian Ker Newman on Imagination and Religious Belief Before looking at the role of the religious imagination in John Henry Newman's life and thought, it is important to establish first of all what Newman meant and what he did not mean by his normal use of the word "imagination." According to John Coulson, in his book Religion and Imagination:'in aid ofa grammar ofassent', "Newman's original conception ofimagination is purely Coleridgean: it is the inventive . .. power."1 Now we know from papers drafted in preparation for An Essay in Aid ofa Grammar ofAssent (1 870) that its famous distinction between notional and real assent was originally termed a distinction between notional and imaginative assent, with the proviso that "the faculty ofimagination ... be taken to stand, not for an inventive power, but for the power, which attends on memory, of recalling to the mind and making present the absent."2 This contrast between the imaginative and the notional survives in the Logos 1:1 1997 Newman on Imagination Grammar of Assent,! but by now the distinction is invariably between the notional and the real. This substitution is explained by Coulson as intended to clarify "the order of our response to faith: we must experience its object as real before we can ask if the belief is true."4 However, at least one reason for the substitution must have been that "imaginative"might be misleading, as it might suggest the well-known Coleridgean meaning. This is confirmed by an earlier draft of the passage contrasting imaginative with notional, where Newman referred to the faculty of imagination as the "power, not only of imagination."5 It is this first draft that Coulson finds "most significant"6 for his view of the Newmanian imagination as essentially the same as the Coleridgean. But this is to miss the point of the strengthening of "not only"to"not,"a significant change intended precisely to minimize the Coleridgean sense. For the alteration surely shows that Newman wanted to emphasize what he called in the Grammar ofAssent the "present imagination of things that are past" in which "memory consists."7There the Coleridgean inventive imagination is seen as a development or elaboration of this— "Further, we are able by an inventive faculty, or the faculty of composition ... to form ... new images."8 Newman had himselfthought of imagination in that secondary sense when in his early Romantic essay, "Poetry, with reference to Aristotle's Poetics" (1 829), he had referredto the"poetical mind"as"imaginative or creative."9And so, when in the Grammar ofAssent he substituted"real"for"imaginative," he was trying to distance himselffrom any misleading Coleridgean or Romantic echoes. He was in fact reverting to his usage as an Anglican preacher when he had spoken of the "realizing" of truths and of"real faith and apprehension."10 There is, nevertheless, a very real connection between this "realizing" and the imagination in that primary sense with which Newman is most concerned both in the Grammar ofAssent and elsewhere in his writings. And this is because in Newman's terminolo97 98 Logos gy something only becomes "real" when one has an "image" of it. What, then, does he mean by an "image"? At the beginning of the Grammar ofAssent, Newman defines a proposition as notional when it expresses an abstract or general notion to the person apprehending it, and real when it expresses an individual fact that ehcits a real apprehension and assent; the latter proposition accordingly is"more vivid and forcible"because"inteUectual ideas cannot compete in effectiveness with the experience ofconcrete facts."11 Unfortunately, by making his point in this unqualified way so early in the book, Newman has laid himself open to misinterpretation on one of his key themes. For if, commentators have not been slow to point out, real assent is concerned only with concrete propositions and notional with abstract, then how is it that we can be far more excited and moved by ideas than by people?12 But in fact in those early pages of the Grammar Newman acknowledges that an ostensibly abstract statement may indeed elicit a real assent from a person for whom it is personaUy experienced as a "living...